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“Two versatile MCs get together and bless you with profound lyricism. KXNG Crooked and Sullee Justice expose a unique vision of their reality in the verses. Crooked Justice is filled with positive and uplifting rhymes along with conscious truths for the riveting minds.” – GlobalFaction promo text

This past Monday, the 1st May 2017, acclaimed Baltimore rapper and cross-cultural artist Sullee J released his latest single, a special collaboration with Long Beach, California-based KXNG Crooked, also known as Crooked I. It is already looking set to be one of Sullee J’s most popular collaborations to date, with its hit mix of digital animation and a team-up with one of West Coast rap’s most technologically proficient names in the business. Sullee himself has released seven mixtapes and numerous singles, collaborating with many artists from different musical backgrounds, successfully fusing hip-hop with Punjabi, Pakistani and Bollywood styles.

The new track, named “Crooked Justice” is a song that is a perfect example of brilliant lyricism over a dope beat. With each bar telling a story, the song comes teamed with a video that is jam-packed with metaphors which reflect “Crooked Justice” in literal terms.

Produced by GlobalFaction, the video is a cool animation of the two rappers on a space travel jaunt, with the lyrics fitting the scenes perfectly. The awesome lyrics, full of meaning, are delivered over a relaxing piano tune, reminiscent hallmarks of the best in independent hip-hop. Look out for some trendy dance moves, Sullee and Crooked jamming to some dope beats on the Moon’s surface – couches and all, and references to major contemporary American issues, such as the Dakota Pipeline controversy. Sullee J and Crooked I’s lyrical styles complement each other perfectly and the track gets you thinking deeply as much as the video entertains you with its colourful cartooney animations.

Crooked I, a.k.a Dominick Wickliffe, is a member of the musical supergroup Slaughterhouse. A successful record company CEO and digital marketing and video channel pioneer, Crooked I is currently signed to Shady Records and has been in the hip-hop business for more than twenty years.

Crooked Justice is available on YouTube and SoundCloud and as a download on iTunes.

VIJAY SHAH via STEPHANIE LANG, WILLIAM HICKS and TechCrunch

The launch will be scheduled at precisely 10:42 AM Pacific Standard Time (7:42 PM London time) from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, located 9.2 miles north-west of the small town of Lompoc. The launch will give SpaceX, one of a fleet of new privately owned space travel concerns, a chance to test out the capabilities of its Falcon 9 rocket. Engineers will attempt to land the Falcon on a floating ‘drone ship’ somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, it was reported.

So far, the Falcon programme has been a successful one for the firm, who made a previous test launch in December 2015 and landed their rocket on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral in Florida state, the iconic homeland of space exploration veterans NASA. That test launch was lauded by the space travel community as a step towards greater diversity in space travel as well as a stage in the development of reusable rockets.

The previous Friday, SpaceX carried out a ‘static fire test’ on the recovered engines from the rocket launched in December. The company’s chief executive officer, Elon Musk, reported on Twitter that the data from the static test ‘looked good’, with the only minor problem being that one of the rocket’s outer engines had ‘thrust fluctuations’, beleived to be because it has swallowed surrounding debris from the rocket or outside it during the launch.

In today’s launch, the Falcon 9 will attempt to land on a drone ship floating on the ocean. This will be SpaceX’s third attempt at this notoriously difficult experiment, with the previous two tries frustrated by the instability of the rocket, the size of the pad and the movement of the ocean causing the ship to move about at its location. Succeeding today will mean SpaceX’s rockets will be considered safer and easier to use, potentially opening up more business for the firm from space tourists and other exploration partners.

The first attempt, made in January 2015, also failed because the booster ran out of hydraulic fluid required to direct its descent. The second attempt, made in April 2015, was closer but ultimately failed when a control valve stopped responding to commands seconds before touchdown, according to TechCrunch.

SpaceX vice president of mission assurance Hans Koenigsmann, at a press conference held this past Friday, justified the reason for this latest experiment and his company ‘switching things up’. He said that he company was unable to receive environmental clearance to land the rocket at Vandenburg so opted to try again with the floating drone ship. He also said that the choice to use the ship was not a reflection of the Falcon 9’s capabilities and that a landing on dry soil was no problem at all. Sadly, unlike previous launches, SpaceX will not be able to provide streamed footage of today’s event due to the difficulties in using a good internet connection far out at sea.

Sunday will mark the last launch of the company’s Falcon 9 v1.1 generation of boosters. SpaceX now has an upgraded version of the rocket with increased thrust capabilities which was used in the successful December flight from Florida.

On board the Falcon 9 will be the $180 million Jason-3 satellite, developed by space agencies NOAA and NASA. The satellite will eventually be launched by SpaceX to enable observations of our planet’s sea levels and detect any changes possibly attributable to global warming.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with an ambition of revoultionising space travel and producing rockets that will one day enable people to dwell on other worlds. It designs, manufactures and launches rockets, of which the Falcon model has been its most well known version. The company, which has 3,000 employees enjoys a close partnership with the U.S. national space agency NASA.

Skywatchers in the United States are in for a visual feast of shooting stars this Sunday as the Leonid meteor shower will be hitting its annual peak in skies over much of the country.

Leonids and ISS (Photo credit: markwilson1977)

Hundreds of professional and amateur astronomers will have their telescopes trained upwards for a glimpse of the meteors, which are one of many meteor showers that pass through the Earth’s orbit annually. What makes this month’s shower even more special is that 2013 has been described as an ‘off-year’ for intense showers, according to astronomy website Universe Today.

In the north American night sky, the Leonids will be emanating from an area of space aligned with the constellation Leo. Other constellations and stars will also be visible in clear early dusk skies at the same time as the Leonids arrive. Ones to watch out for include Ursa Major, Leo Minor, Hydra and Crater, according to a graphic released today by Universe Today.

Astronomers following the Leonids say that their projections for November indicate a twin-peaked maximum. The first peak will arrive today at 10:00 UT/5:00 AM EST with best visibility restricted to the North American continent, weather permitting. The second peak in meteor activity will also happen today, six hours later after the first. It is expected to commence at 16:00 UT/11:00. That peak will be visible from islands in the Central Pacific, possibly including the U.S. state of Hawai’i. However there will be a full moon between the two peaks which will affect visibility at around 10:16 AM EST/15:16 UT.

The Leonids are expected to be more numerous this year than usual. An average shower has a zenithal hourly rate of 10-20, meaning anyone looking out for the space rocks will see around 10-20 per hour. However this weekend’s shower may have a hourly rate of more than 1,000, an unusual and rare upsurge that occurs once every 33 years. The last time this happened on such a grand scale was in 1998-99, and ironically the Earth will experience a intermission between major meteor storms which will start next year (2014-16). About 50-70 of the Leonid meteors will leave trails as they pass through Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in shooting stars and perfect conditions for people out and about who will be able to watch them with just a set of binoculars.

Would-be viewers are encouraged to see the Leonids at their best by getting up early as the shower will be most noticeable in the early morning. They should position themselves with the Moon hidden behind a building or tree so that the moonlight is blocked and prevented from overshadowing the streaks of light the Leonids will be leaving in their wake. If you are planning to take pictures of this momentous astronomical event, it is easy. Photographers need only arm themselves with a standard DSLR camera and a tripod, as well as spare batteries in the event of their camera losing power. They should shoot continuously as meteors can pass by unnoticed by the human eye but then get picked up by the camera lens.

English: The most famous depiction of the 1833 actually produced in 1889 for the Adventist book Bible Readings for the Home Circle – the engraving is by Adolf Vollmy based upon an original painting by the Swiss artist Karl Jauslin, that is in turn based on a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner on his way from Florida to New Orleans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Leonids’ source is the comet Comet 55p/Tempel-Tuttle, which has an orbit that takes it past the Earth every 33 years, explaining the rise in meteor shower activity which occurs at the same time. They get their name from the fact that they radiate from around the constellation Leo. When Tempel-Tuttle approaches the Sun, it warms up and parts of its body are cast off as meteoroids, which become the Leonids. An annual Leonid shower may deposit 12 or 13 tons of particles across the entire Earth.

The Leonids have long been a source of both fascination and fear. A very strong shower in 1833 caused so much consternation in the eastern seaboard (coast) of the United States that there was an explosion in the number of evangelical Christian churches being founded, as preachers warned of the coming of Armageddon. Mass panic as the sky as it turned bright with the aura of a thousand pieces of comet colliding with the atmosphere saw an entire community of the Mormon sect uprooted from their homes in Independence, Missouri, and the shower was noted in the stories of Native Americans and in the journals of early U.S. astronomers. Reportings of sightings of the Leonids date back to 900 AD.

For astronomers over much of the U.S. , this weekend is an exciting time. Many seasoned skywatchers have seen previous visits by the Leonids and are optimistic that not even the Moon will stop them seeing this jaw-dropping moment of astronomy at its most visible and entrancing.

Sixty-five million years ago, a massive object from outer space slammed into the Earth near what is now the Yucatan peninsula in modern-day Mexico. It released thousand of times the energy of an atomic bomb, leaving behind a crater more than 180 kilometres wide. The collision rained molten and pulverised rock over an area of more than 2,500 kilometres in diameter, creating devastating firestorms. It also caused worldwide temperatures to plummet as millions of tonnes of dust was thrown up into the atmosphere, blocking out the Sun for decades. As plants died off, the food chains that supported land dinosaurs and their marine reptile relatives collapsed. Dinosaurs soon became extinct, enabling mammals and later, humans, to take the dinosaurs’ place as dominant animals.

English: This shaded relief image of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula show a subtle, but unmistakable, indication of the Chicxulub impact crater. Most scientists now agree that this impact was the cause of the Cretatious-Tertiary Extinction, the event 65 million years ago that marked the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs as well as the majority of life then on Earth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It has been heavily debated about what exactly gorged out the infamous Chicxulub crater, with the guilty party either assumed to be a meteor or comet. Now a group of researchers in New Hampshire state, America, say they are almost certain it was a comet pulled in off its course by Earth’s powerful gravitational field. In findings shown to observers at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the researchers used complex chemical analyses to determine that Chicxulub was impacted by an object smaller than previously realised.

Until recently, most scientists believed that the space object that wiped out the dinosaurs as well most other life on Earth was a predominately metallic asteroid containing the rare metal iridium. It was presumed to be relatively large, slow-moving and heavy in metal content, based on traces of iridium found in rock layers worldwide dating from the impact time. Iridium does not occur naturally on our planet in any large quantities and such a spike in the metal’s levels was attributed to fallout from the gigantic iridium-rich meteor settling over the Earth’s land masses.

Chicxulub impact – artist impression (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However the U.S. researchers says that established iridium counts are inaccurate. By comparing iridium counts with that of another rare element, osmium, found in asteroids, they discovered that far less iridium has been deposited than would have been expected for such a massive extraterrestrial object. According to their studies, the lethal asteroid would have needed to be 5km wide to have deposited the two metals in such quantities, but that was inconsistent with the size of the Mexican crater. They believe that the real culprit behind the extinction of the dinosaurs was a very fast and small long-tailed comet.

Long-tailed comets are balls of ice, water and frozen gases that typically travel through space and occasionally pass by the Sun. Their trajectories can take many thousands or even millions of years to complete as they move around our solar system. If such a comet strayed too close to the Earth, it would have been snagged easily and its high speed would have created enough force to generate a wide crater, holding sufficient power to have been able to wipe 70% of all species, as has happened in the great Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event around 65 millions years ago.

However the findings have been questioned by other scientists. Dr Gareth Collins of the Imperial College in London, who specialises in studying the nature of impact craters, said “I don’t think it is possible to accurately determine the impactor size from geochemistry”.

“Geochemistry tells you – quite accurately – only the mass of meteoritic material that is distributed globally, not the total mass of the impactor. To estimate the latter, one needs to know what fraction of the impactor was distributed globally, as opposed to being ejected to space or landing close to the crater.“

Even the researchers in New Hampshire, working at the Dartmouth College, admit that they are not completely certain if it was really a stray comet that killed off the dinosaurs, but one, Jason Moore said that ultimately “the overall aim of our project is to better characterise the impactor that produced the crater in the Yucatan peninsula [in Mexico]“

Chicxulub (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A geophysical map of the Chicxulub crater. Most scientists are certain that this was the aftermath of the comet that ended the reign of dinosaurs.

Understanding what exactly wiped out three-quarters of the planet’s living things 65 million years ago is vital for when we are faced with such a situation in the distant future, which scientists unanimously agree is more likely than not. About 95% of all near-Earth objects in space with a diameter of one kilometre or more have been discovered by astronomers. However, only about 10% of the 13,000 – 20,000 asteroids above the size of 140m have been detected and tracked by scientists at organisations like NASA, the world leader in asteroid astronomy.

There are believed to be far more comets in our solar system than near-Earth asteroids but NASA scientists say that the likelihood of the Earth being pummelled by another comet is small. Most comets travel far beyond the Earth and Sun with many not being sighted for millennia. A NASA census of historical collisions between our world and so-called near-Earth objects shows that only 10% were comets.

Over a week ago, the inhabitants of the industrial town of Chelyabinsk, located in the freezing tundra of Russia’s Far East, witnessed the visit of an extraterrestrial visitor from the furthest reaches of outer space. It was an event which significantly affected and astounded millions of people, not only across the Russian Federation, but in areas thousands of miles away.

(c) Oleg Sh. @ Flickr

The town of Chelyabinsk, located in Siberia’s industrial heartland near the border with Kazakhstan.

A meteor, measuring around 17 metres in diameter, and believed to weigh in at an estimated 10,000 tonnes, entered the atmosphere somewhere above the Ural mountains that traditionally separates Europe from Asia. It began to disintegrate, sending fireballs and pieces of meteorite crashing down over a large swathe of the Siberian territory. Several pieces fell upon the town of Chelyabinsk, narrowly missing the Mayak nuclear facility managed by Russia’s governmental nuclear agency, Rosatom. The town lies around 1,500 kilometres from the capital Moscow.

The remaining meteorite, much reduced in size, was believed to have finally made contact with the Earth at the Chebarkul lake outside Chelyabinsk, slamming a 11-12 foot wide hole in the lake’s ice, according to a video released by local observers.

Meteor trace (Photo credit: alexeya)

The Chelyabinsk meteorite that brought terror to the Siberian steppes.

Residents of Chelyabinsk on their way to work during the morning rush hour reported seeing a massive white fireball streak across the sky, which in one video captured by a local, seemed to resemble a contrail like that released by an airplane. As the meteor made its way rapidly through the Earth’s lower atmosphere, its passage created a devastating shockwave that shattered the windows of buildings, set off car alarms and even tore off 6,000 square feet of a zinc factory’s roof. Locals reacted with a mix of shock and panic. As the fireball flashed over Chelyabinsk, traffic on the town’s roads came to a standstill, and many reported feeling that it was the end of the world. So bright was the meteor’s arrival, it was seen in the city of Yekaterinburg, 200 kilometres away. People were reported huddling in the doorways of buildings with fright as the blinding light travelled across the dawn sky. Worried parents kept their children at home as schools all over the Chelyabinsk region remained closed. There were initial fears that the Mayak nuclear facility has been affected but Rosatom engineers reported no damage to the site’s uranium reactors.

Latest figures report that over a thousand people were injured, mostly by flying pieces of glass from office and shop windows. Local hospitals struggled to cope with the demands as casualties streamed into their wards, many of whom also needed treatment for shock. People found that they were not receiving mobile phone signals, causing a communication crisis as they struggled to contact family, friends and colleagues. Chelyabinsk’s civic website reported 758 injuries, while Mikhail Yurevich, the governor of the Chelyabinsk oblast’ (region) stated a region-wide total of at least 950 casualties, two-thirds of whom received light injuries from flying glass and debris.

In addition to shattering windows, the meteor’s shockwave wreaked havoc on buildings. Russia’s interior ministry reported damage to 300 different locations, including housing, schools, hospitals and even an ice hockey stadium. Governor Yurevich estimated the total costs of damages at US$ 33 million (1 billion Russian rubles). Windows were broken in the ulitsa Lenina, a main road in the centre of town, while some shopfronts were buckled by the power of the resultant shockwave in the meteor’s wake. The government has ordered checks of affected buildings to determine if they remain seismically and structurally sound.

Thankfully, no fatalities or direct strikes by meteorite strikes on people were reported, but a wave of fear spread over Russian media and citizens, with one nationalist politician claiming that the meteor was a secret military manoeuvre by the Americans, a theory dismissed as farcical by the federal government. Reports of the meteor made frontpage news in media outlets across the globe, especially as its arrival coincided with the passing by of asteroid 2012 DA14. This asteroid was reported by NASA to have made a close approach to Earth at a distance of about 35,800 kilometres in the same week as the meteor that burned up over Siberia. However astronomers have said that there was no connection between the two events.

A planet accompanied by not one, but four suns, has been discovered deep in space by two part-time astronomers. In what has been billed as one of the most exciting recent developments in the study of the universe, the planet and its four suns have been spotted in a galaxy 5,000 light years from Earth.

The extraterrestrial world was discovered by American volunteers in collaboration with the website PlanetHunters.org, run by a team of scientists including Dr Chris Lintott of the UK’s Oxford University. PlanetHunters.org relies on its international panel of ‘armchair astronomers’ to collect and interpret data in its scientific quest for new groundbreaking discoveries.

Individual volunteers use the website to study the outputs of light coming from far-off stars. Any dip in the star’s luminosity could potentially be the transit of an exoplanet passing in front and blocking the starlight seen from telescopes on Earth. It was this effect, spotted by Kian Jek of San Francisco and colleague Robert Gagliano from the small town of Cottonwood, Arizona, that helped uncover the new world. Jek & Gagliano’s discovery has been confirmed by a team of professionals based at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawai’i, and has been formally announced at the United States’ Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada meeting this past Tuesday.

The planet, believed to be made of rock and heavy minerals just like Earth, is estimated to be six times larger than our planet.

While many exoplanets have been discovered outside our solar system orbiting two stars – a binary star setup – this is the first time a planet with a four-star configuration has been reported.

An artist’s impression of PH1 and two of its suns (c) The Independent

The planet orbits one pair of stars, as with those in binary star systems, but unusually, it is in turn circled by a second pair of suns at a distance of several billion kilometres away.

Astronomers are still as yet intrigued how the planet came into existence in such an unusual placement. In an interview with The Independent newspaper last week, Dr. Lintott said of the discovery “It’s fascinating to try and imagine what it would be like to visit a planet with four suns in its sky, but this new world is confusing astronomers – it’s not at all clear how it formed in such a busy environment”. Normally, four stars in such close proximity would be expected to have a massive enough collective field of gravity that any planet-forming dust clouds would have been torn apart and incinerated.

The planet has now been named PH1, after the website that helped discover it. PH1 lies at such a distance that it would take 40,000 years for humans to reach it, using our current space exploration technology. Very little is known of PH1 including whether if it is the only planet in its solar system. As the tally of exoplanets increases every month, the possibility of finding more worlds like PH1 is a given certainty in our search for another Earth – and potentially another world to visit and colonise.